ANNOUNCEMENT: Penn Bowl Trash III @ UPenn 2/13/11
Hello all! We are proud to announce that UPenn will be hosting its third annual house-written trash tournament on Sunday February 13, 2011. This will be held the day after Penn Bowl. This tournament will be a regular difficulty trash tournament that should be accessible to casual players, but at the same time fun and entertaining for the more competitive members of the trash community. We intend to provide at least 12 rounds of play. This will be a completely house-written tournament, so no freelance packets are needed.

Distribution:
20/20 Total
4/4 Sports
4/4 Movies
4/4 TV
4/4 Music
2/1 or 1/2 Video Games
1/0 or 0/1 Comics
2/2 other (This will include a mix of food, consumerama, internet fads, trash lit, and questions which combine multiple elements of the distribution)

We are also accepting bids for mirrors of this tournament. If you are interested in running a mirror, e-mail me at [email protected]. Additionally, if you have any questions, feel free to send me an e-mail or just post in the thread. Information on day-of-tournament logistics will come later as soon as I have that specific info for you.

Last edited by joenguyen90 on Sat Dec 11, 2010 7:06 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

Because Penn Bowl will be moved a week earlier to February 12th, Penn Bowl Trash will also move up one week to SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13th, 2011. Please disregard the first announced date, as FEBRUARY 13th will be the date on which this will be held. Sorry for any confusion.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

DumbJaques wrote:If you write a tournament that does not suck, you don't need lames.

True but even the best written tournaments will still have bonuses that swing way on the hard time occasionally.

Penn Bowl Trash is how trash should be written, pop culture to academic writing standards. Lames are for when the bonus is on Mike Vanderjagt's teammates on the Minnesota Fighting Pike, the underage members of the Chinese gymnastic team, or Nalin's opponents from middle school quiz bowl . There is no room for that garbage in well-written trash.

Nalin
Scranton Middle School (2000-2003)
Brighton High School (2003-2007)
Michigan State University (2007-2011)
Semi-Retired (2012-present)

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:I can't speak for the inclusion of lames, but I imagine they won't happen. But I can speak for the comic book distribution because I'll likely be writing it.

Not sure why a football player has teammates on a hockey team, but whatever.

In all seriousness, we should all be clamoring for fewer lames and less anime in our trash tournaments.

I don't think I've ever actually seen a tournament with more than a token amount of anime in a trash tournament. I don't personally like anime, but I don't see the reason for this aversion to anime besides the fact that Matt Weiner doesn't like it. It's clealry something that has at least some pop culture appeal and should probably come up a little more than it does in a typical trash tournament (which in my experience is around 0-1 times per tournament).

Not sure why a football player has teammates on a hockey team, but whatever.

In all seriousness, we should all be clamoring for fewer lames and less anime in our trash tournaments.

I don't think I've ever actually seen a tournament with more than a token amount of anime in a trash tournament. I don't personally like anime, but I don't see the reason for this aversion to anime besides the fact that Matt Weiner doesn't like it. It's clealry something that has at least some pop culture appeal and should probably come up a little more than it does in a typical trash tournament (which in my experience is around 0-1 times per tournament).

I don't think the aversion is to anime, per se, but to a particular subset of individuals that enjoy anime and the animus is transferred from the people to anime.

True but even the best written tournaments will still have bonuses that swing way on the hard time occasionally.

I really do not understand what this sentence means, but the idea behind lames was that people used to write bonuses about three minor Nascar drivers. Since a good bonus will include an easy part, consistently, lames shouldn't be necessary. Even if a bonus were to "swing way on the hard time," there's no particular reason you'd know that after the first clue, which is when you have to employ your lame.

If a trash tournament is well-written, you don't need lames any more than you'd need them for a well-written academic tournament. I suppose you can argue all tournaments should have lames, but I don't see that going down.

Chris Ray
OSU
University of Chicago, 2016
University of Maryland, 2014
ACF, PACE

True but even the best written tournaments will still have bonuses that swing way on the hard time occasionally.

I really do not understand what this sentence means, but the idea behind lames was that people used to write bonuses about three minor Nascar drivers. Since a good bonus will include an easy part, consistently, lames shouldn't be necessary. Even if a bonus were to "swing way on the hard time," there's no particular reason you'd know that after the first clue, which is when you have to employ your lame.

If a trash tournament is well-written, you don't need lames any more than you'd need them for a well-written academic tournament. I suppose you can argue all tournaments should have lames, but I don't see that going down.

Well, the theoretical purpose for lames would be if it's clear from the first sentence that all three questions are on NASCAR drivers and you know nothing about NASCAR, because you only have one sports guy and his best minor sport is soccer, or something. Basically, it's admitting that no one really wants to be that good at all the trash subdistributions, so you can just not answer some of them. It may be that lames uniquely have a niche in trash, because it's hard to argue "no, every team _really should_ have someone who cares about disco" or something, and because it's hard to find a reasonable definition of difficulty for, say, minor sports: what's hard for a person who has the slightest interest in NASCAR is probably worlds apart from someone who sees cars on ESPN 2 sometimes, and it's not entirely clear where between those two the hypothetical target trash team for a given tournament is. Also, regional variance may matter more in trash than in, say, biology; while people in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, and Buffalo care about hockey a few thousand percent more than the rest of the country, people in the south care more about NASCAR. But everyone learns the Krebs cycle. So, like, there probably can be limited use for lames, but that's mostly if you already admit that there are minor sports or other regionally variable content in your tournament that's just too hard for someone not from a high interest region even though they've affirmatively said "yeah, I'm going to a trash tournament today and I'm the one expected to know sports on my team.

The writers (Ben and I) did not plan on including lames at this tournament, and because more quizbowlers are averse to having lames at Trash tournaments, it is very unlikely that we will have them the day of Penn Bowl Trash. That said, we will emphasize difficulty distribution (easy-medium-hard) on bonuses and make sure that we will write fair bonuses.

P.S. Questions will be powermarked as we edit the tournament.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

Anyway, I think Andy has it right about the theoretical justification for lames (the existence of so many sub-distributions that you can't possibly cover them all). In the modern game, bonuses should be written such that you can get 10 on that NASCAR bonus even if your sports guy knows nothing about NASCAR. Not that every easy part should be a free 10 points, but each should include something that people who are conscious most of the time and who own a television and/or a newspaper subscription will have heard of.

Early trash (and TRASH) sets didn't pay enough attention to this focus on accessible easy parts (which also applies to the answer space for tossups). These days, people know that if all three parts of a bonus are asking for female professional bowlers, some serious editing is in order.

Brian Weikle
I say what it occurs to me to say when I think I hear people say things. More, I cannot say.

True but even the best written tournaments will still have bonuses that swing way on the hard time occasionally.

I really do not understand what this sentence means, but the idea behind lames was that people used to write bonuses about three minor Nascar drivers. Since a good bonus will include an easy part, consistently, lames shouldn't be necessary. Even if a bonus were to "swing way on the hard time," there's no particular reason you'd know that after the first clue, which is when you have to employ your lame.

If a trash tournament is well-written, you don't need lames any more than you'd need them for a well-written academic tournament. I suppose you can argue all tournaments should have lames, but I don't see that going down.

Well, the theoretical purpose for lames would be if it's clear from the first sentence that all three questions are on NASCAR drivers and you know nothing about NASCAR, because you only have one sports guy and his best minor sport is soccer, or something. Basically, it's admitting that no one really wants to be that good at all the trash subdistributions, so you can just not answer some of them. It may be that lames uniquely have a niche in trash, because it's hard to argue "no, every team _really should_ have someone who cares about disco" or something, and because it's hard to find a reasonable definition of difficulty for, say, minor sports: what's hard for a person who has the slightest interest in NASCAR is probably worlds apart from someone who sees cars on ESPN 2 sometimes, and it's not entirely clear where between those two the hypothetical target trash team for a given tournament is. Also, regional variance may matter more in trash than in, say, biology; while people in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, and Buffalo care about hockey a few thousand percent more than the rest of the country, people in the south care more about NASCAR. But everyone learns the Krebs cycle. So, like, there probably can be limited use for lames, but that's mostly if you already admit that there are minor sports or other regionally variable content in your tournament that's just too hard for someone not from a high interest region even though they've affirmatively said "yeah, I'm going to a trash tournament today and I'm the one expected to know sports on my team.

Exactly, I didnt and don't mean to blow up this board but that was basically my reasoning and thinking.

- The Penn Bowl Trash Mirror at Berry College is expected to be moved to Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, GA to be held sometime in mid-March. I am sure that more specifics about this will be posted later.

- As for Penn Bowl Trash at UPenn on Feb. 13th, we only have a few teams that have explicitly stated their intent on playing.

Villanova (1 team, 1 buzzer)
Delaware (2 teams, 1 buzzer)

If you are interested in playing, please let us know by the end of next week at the latest.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

Lucy Lane wrote:In terms of difficulty, how comparable will this be to TERP that was played earlier this year?

Penn Bowl Trash is at regular difficulty, which is roughly the same level as TERP (easy-to-regular). Perhaps the later rounds may skew towards a slightly higher difficulty, but Ben and I tend to emphasize accessible answer choices in addition to quality writing. You can refer to past incarnations of Penn Bowl Trash in Wastebin for a general sense of how the questions are.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

Cooper98 wrote:What time does this start on Sunday? Our plane leaves at 430. So I'm not sure if we will be able to play or not.

We plan to start at 9 AM. Ideally, if everyone shows up on time and everything runs smoothly (30 min. rounds and one hour lunch), prelims should end at 3 PM. Of course, a planned schedule for a quizbowl tournament is about as reliable as Egypt's Internet connection (and perhaps with twice as much lag time). I imagine that you'd be able to play a significant amount of the tournament, if not all of it, but it all depends on how smoothly it goes.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

If you're still interested in playing or if you're interested in mirroring this at another site, please let me know as soon as you can.

I can't speak definitively on the subject, because we still have one logistical issue that might prevent us from making it, but the vibe I've been picking up from my team is that we'd like to play this. If we do, we'll presumably be able to bring our buzzer.

I was curious if there was any chance of hosting a mirror of this in Ontario at some point in the near future. Nothing is set in stone here but just trying to get some information to see if we can make it work.

CraigM wrote:I was curious if there was any chance of hosting a mirror of this in Ontario at some point in the near future. Nothing is set in stone here but just trying to get some information to see if we can make it work.

CraigM wrote:I was curious if there was any chance of hosting a mirror of this in Ontario at some point in the near future. Nothing is set in stone here but just trying to get some information to see if we can make it work.

Depending on what date you're looking at, I (at the least) could get on board.

Brian McNamara
Western University '13
University of Waterloo '14
Temple University '20

This will probably be the last call for all teams and free agents who are interested in playing PBT this Sunday. If you want to play PBT and are not listed above or if you want to change the number of your teams coming on Sunday, please contact me to give a confirmed number of teams and/or buzzers by this Saturday.

Joe Nguyen
UPenn '12

"Socrates said true knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. By those standards, I'm the smartest man in the world. And also, who's Socrates?" - Stephen Colbert

Logistics:
We will be holding Penn Bowl Trash at the same location as Penn Bowl proper, in Williams Hall on 36th and Spruce Street. We plan on starting 9 AM, so please meet in the main lobby area of Williams Hall at 8:30 AM so we can have registration and buzzers set up in the rooms. If you have any other questions, please contact me.